The Nahuas are a Panoan-speaking indigenous group that lives in the headwaters of the Purús, Manu and Mishagua rivers basins in southeastern Peru (Feather 2004). The Nahuas that live in Atalaya are called the “Sharanahuas” or “Sharitas” (diminutive of Sharanahuas) by the local people. The term means “beautiful people”. However, this group is officially known in the
anthropological literature as Nahua and is part of a broader set of indigenous groups which include the Yaminahuas, the Marinahuas, the Cashinahuas and the Chitonahuas. For example in the excerpt below, Feather (2009) explains how the different Nahua groups broke up due to tense interrelationships.
[Nahuas] do not represent a coherent ethnicity, but instead are local groups of the same Purus-Panoan complex that have broken up and united with a different local group from a new village. Many of these fissions and fusions resulted from the traumatic consequences of the rubber boom but also (...) were a response to internal tensions and conflicts. (p.74) The term Nahua means “outsider” in contrast to Yora or Yurúa which means literally
“flesh” or “body”(Feather 2009). Indigenous people from this group prefer to use the term Yora to refer to themselves, rather than Nahua (Mora, Zarzar et al. 1997). However, the Nahuas of Atalaya have accepted that others use the term Nahua to refer to them. They also now use the term Nahua to refer to their own ethnic group (Feather 2009). Most anthropological texts also use the term Nahua to refer to these groups.
The area the Nahuas occupy in Atalaya is rich in natural resources and “since 1950s attracted increasing number of loggers and oil companies, as well as missionaries attempting to
‘contact’ them. There were frequent violent clashes between the Nahua, loggers and oil-prospecting teams” (Feather 2009:72). As a result of such clashes, the Nahuas were considered a violent nomadic people by mestizos in Atalaya, with little or no knowledge of horticulture.
The contact with outsiders, such as missionaries, loggers and employees of hydrocarbon projects, has been a traumatic process for the Nahuas (Rummenhoeller 2007). In 1984, four Nahuas were captured by loggers and taken to the town of Sepahua. Until then they were considered by the Peruvian government as one of the few remaining “uncontacted” (no
contactados) tribes in the Amazon20. Following this contact with the outside world, after centuries of being in voluntary isolation, around 60% of the Nahua population was lost (Hill and Kaplan 1989) A MoH report noted:
The contact of loggers with three Nahua Indians in 1984 led to an epidemic of respiratory infections that developed into pneumonia in the rest of the population. The pneumonia was in addition to preexisting parasitic infections, malaria and gastrointestinal problems.
Since then, the Nahua began to rely more and more on outside people for goods and services they needed in their new [sedentary] lifestyle (salt, canned food, noodles, various goods, clothing, medicines, medical support for new diseases, guns and engines). Since that date, their world and everyday life was totally changed 21 (MINSA 2008).
In 1990, promoted in part by Catholic Missionaries, Nahuas settled in a community that I will call “Sharita”. Sharita was my first field site. In 1990 their territory became part of the Kugapakori Nahua Reserve which was established by the Peruvian state “to protect the lives, rights and territories of indigenous peoples in South East Peru avoiding, or strictly limiting their contact with national society” (Feather 2004).
All indigenous settlements located within the Kugapakori Nahua reserve fall under the
“area of influence” of the Camisea Project.22 The Camisea Project is a natural gas extraction project headed by Pluspetrol (an Argentinean company) (Feather 2002; MINSA 2008). This project is the first large-scale natural gas project in the Peruvian Amazon and 74% of the gas reserve is located within the Nahuas’ traditional domain (MINSA 2003).
20 The Sharanahua used to be considered an “ethnic group in voluntary isolation” (grupo étnico en aislamiento voluntario) . They are now designated as an “ethnic group in initial or recent contact” (grupo étnico en contacto inicial o contacto reciente). These are categories used by the Peruvian government to classify indigenous communities from the Amazon and grant them special protection rights (MINSA, 2008)
21 El contacto de madereros con tres indígenas nahuas en 1984, produjo, en el resto de su población, una epidemia de infecciones respiratorias que se complicaron en neumonía, sumándose a las parasitosis, paludismo y problemas gastrointestinales que ya padecían. Los nahuas desde entonces empezaron a depender cada vez más de la gente foránea a su grupo para obtener bienes y servicios que necesitan en su nueva condición (sal, enlatados, fideos, diversas mercancías, vestimenta, medicinas, apoyo médico para las nuevas enfermedades, escopetas y motores).
Desde esa fecha, su mundo y cotidianidad ha cambiado totalmente.
22 An “area of influence” refers to the area that would be affected by the activities of a particular project according to its environmental and social impact assessment reports.
Indigenous groups who have lived for a long time in voluntary isolation from other indigenous groups (as a result of traumatic experiences mostly during the rubber boom) and who had been “re-contacted” recently, usually suffer epidemics of diarrheic or respiratory illnesses (Huertas Castillo 2007). Such epidemics become more frequent once communities settle in one place and foreigners enter their territory. Frequent epidemics reflect the existing risks over the demographic equilibrium of these populations (Huertas Castillo 2007). The vulnerability of the Nahuas led to the construction of a health post in 2009 in the community of Sharita. It was at this health post that Hugo, one of the INTs I visited, was working during my fieldwork.
One characteristic of the Nahuas is their mobile lifestyle, which consists of journeys through towns and forest (Feather 2009). Feather argues that just as Nahuas travel –physically–
to other places, they also do it spiritually and travel through body and spirit, present and past (Feather 2009). Given that there is no specific information about the Nahuas’ medical system, I will be using information about the Cashinahua medical system to provide an overview of specific medical concepts of this Panoan-speaking group.
The concept of the body among the Nahuas and the Cashinahuas (who have been more studied) is crucial in understanding aspects of their ethnomedical system. McCallum (1996), for instance, explains that the Cashinahua body is the place in which social and supernatural processes coalesce. The body for Cashinahuas “is made by others in a constant flow involving nutrition, abstention, the application of medicines, body painting, baptismal rituals, and formal training (McCallum 1996:352)”. Thus, when a woman is pregnant, both the father and the mother of the baby must follow a specific diet since what they eat affects the shape and growth of the fetus (McCallum 1996). Following these ideas about the body, Feather (2009) found out that according to Nahua cosmology, illnesses are caused by 'others' in the form of spirits of
animals or other beings. The cure to illnesses he explains, can be found both in pharmaceuticals (which they obtain in Sepahua or at the Health Post) and in the domain of shamanism.
Lagrou (2004) explains that among the Cashinahuas there are herbal doctors and poison owners (herbal doctors’ counterparts). Herbal doctors know a large range of plants which they use to heal (Kensinger 1998). According to Cashinahuas, illnesses can have two possible origins, either natural or spiritual. Natural illnesses are considered part of the lifecycle, just as birth, old age and death. Natural illnesses are treated by the herbalist. However, when the sick person does not respond to the herbalist’s treatment, people suspect that the illness is caused by the spirits who have been offended or who are acting on behalf of a sorcerer (Kensinger 1998). It is in these cases that the family members of the sick person resort to a shaman, who will go into trance to identify the cause of the illness (Kensinger 1998).
Cashinahua shamans use various plant substances (such as Ayahuasca23 and tobacco) to alter perception (Lagrou 2004). They also apply the extract from a sacred plant into their eyes to visualize pathogenic agents they extract them from the bodies of their patients (Lagrou 2004).
Feather (2009) explains that among the Nahuas of Atalaya, drinking Ayahuasca is not an exclusive activity of shamans. Based on his informants’ accounts he realized that Ayahuasca sessions are represented as journeys during which each person sings a rabi; a non-curative song
“that describe an upward journey into the world of the owners of the shori [Ayahuasca]” (p.79).
23 Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drink made from the stem of the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi. The ayahuasca drink is sometimes, but rarely, made from the ayahuasca vine alone; almost invariably other plants are added (Beyer 2009). The most common preparation of ayahuasca is the concoction of Banisteriopsis caapi plus Psychotria viridis (Luna 2011). The ritual use of ayahuasca is a common thread linking the religion and spirituality of almost all the indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon (Beyer 2009). The Upper Amazonian religious culture area is characterized by a number of common features — the use of psychoactive plants; the presence of magical substances kept within the shaman’s body; notions of sickness as caused by the intrusion of pathogenic objects projected by an enemy or sorcerer; the ambiguity of shamanic ability to do both good and evil; the central sacrality of tobacco; the acquisition of songs from the spirits; the use of songs for the creation of both medicines and poisons;
a focus on healing with the mouth through blowing and sucking; and the importance of sound — singing, whistling, blowing, and rattling — in both healing and sorcery (Beyer 2009).
When Ayahuasca is drunk in the context of a healing ritual with a shaman, the rabis are followed by curing songs (koshuiti), sung by shamans who are trying to heal a patient (Feather 2009).
The Cashinahua of the Purús River classify shamans into two groups. The first group is the dauya, the one with medicine, who kills and heals through the use of medicinal plants. The second group is the mukaya, who heals and kills with the help of the yuxin, spirits, using a bitter substance called muka, which is the materialization of yuxin power (Beyer 2009). Similarly, Kensinger (1998) explains that there are two types of medicine among the Cashinahua; sweet medicine or “dau bata” and bitter medicine or “muka bata”. Dau bata is associated with herbalists who heal using medicinal plants he collects from the forest or from his own medicinal garden. On the other hand, muka bata is associated with a healer that has gained knowledge about plants from spirits. As such, this kind of healer treats illnesses caused by sorcerers or by a spirit who has been offended (Kensinger 1998).
According to Lagrou (2004), scholars affirm that the Cashinahuas believe they have lost all their powerful specialists – sorcerers and shamans alike. A possible explanation for such affirmations is that they want to protect the knowledge held by shamans, herbalist and sorcerers from outsiders (Lagrou 2004). By telling researchers that there are no shamans or sorcerers in their communities, they avoid talking about them and providing information about their healing rituals and medical systems.